Should the city of Syracuse have to pay to police Carrier Dome traffic?

Gary Walts / The Post-Standard, 2009A Syracuse police officer directs traffic at Adams and Almond streets in the city on a Sunday in 2009 when a game was scheduled at the Carrier Dome.

Syracuse has been spending about $200,000 a year for the past several years to control traffic at Carrier Dome events. Some city officials think that at a time of increasing financial stress, Syracuse University should pick up the whole tab.

“Why are we doing that?” asked Common Councilor Ryan McMahon. “The university makes millions of dollars on these events. We can’t afford it.”

City and university officials are renegotiating the contract that determines how much SU should reimburse the city for the cost of police officers who control traffic. From July 2007 to June 2010, the total bill for traffic control was just over $1.1 million. SU paid about $538,000, and the city picked up about $592,000. Numbers for 2011 aren’t complete yet.

McMahon, the city’s auditor and its top lawyer all say SU should pay all the costs of traffic control. The city administrator involved in the negotiating, William Ryan, however, disagrees.

“Contrary to what some other people in the administration believe, I believe we do have an obligation to pay,” said Ryan, the city’s director of administration. “We have an obligation to our people to keep the neighborhoods safe and keep safe passage for emergency vehicles to and from the hospital.”

How much the city should pay, Ryan said, is still under discussion.

SU spokesman Kevin Quinn declined to comment, saying the city and university were in negotiations.

The contract was approved by the Common Council in 2007 and expired in June 2010. While a new one is being renegotiated by Mayor Stephanie Miner’s administration, both sides are abiding by the terms of the expired contract. Ryan said the school year and events at the Dome, are winding down, so there’s no rush to sign a new contract.

The contract primarily covers SU sporting events, but also includes SU block parties, state high school football championships, field band competitions and youth basketball tournaments.

Security inside the Dome is not covered by the contract. For that, SU hires police officers individually as private contractors.

Agreements have been in place since at least 1979 with the same basic premise: SU pays for whatever isn’t covered by the city’s share of sales taxes at Dome events. Under the current agreement, SU must pay for costs that “exceed the amount budgeted by the city for such costs from sales tax revenue it receives from the events held at the Carrier Dome.”

The fact that the city collects sales taxes at Dome events is irrelevant to how much SU should pay for traffic control, McMahon said.

“Just because we get sales tax (on Dome events) should have no bearing
on us having to use our police, take them off a different beat and put them at a private entity for three or four hours of overtime,” he said.

The exact amount of sales tax generated at individual Dome events is difficult to compute, said Juanita Perez Williams, corporation counsel. Regardless, she said, the city earned that tax revenue and should not have to share it with SU.

“It’s a revenue that the city gets that we end up paying back to the university,” Perez Williams said. “The city should simply get reimbursed for all of its services to the university.”

City Auditor Phil LaTessa also questioned the contract in an audit he released in January about police overtime.

“The city should begin to renegotiate this contract to insure that all costs incurred by the city for events that benefit the university are fully reimbursed,” LaTessa wrote.

From January 2007 to December 2010, the city provided traffic control for 330 Dome events with a combined 2.8 million spectators, according to documents provided by the mayor’s office.

For the Penn State game in 2008, the city deployed 65 police officers for a total cost of $26,855 with salary and benefits — the most expensive event in the four years.

With one explicit exception: SU doesn’t have to pay anything when it hosts NCAA tournament basketball games, the contract states, “due to the large economic benefits generated from the attendees of such events.”

The city held a regional NCAA men’s semifinal in March 2010. It attracted 41,000 fans over two nights and cost the city about $32,000 in traffic control.

Under the contract, SU must provide the city with an estimated attendance for every Dome event. The city uses those estimated numbers to decide how many officers to assign. After each event, SU gives the city the actual attendance.